What Photo Picker does was (mostly) already available since Android 4.4 KitKat with the documents picker (Files app) and the ACTION_GET_CONTENT or ACTION_OPEN_D

What Photo Picker does was (mostly) already available since Android 4.4 KitKat with the documents picker (Files app) and the ACTION_GET_CONTENT or ACTION_OPEN_DOCUMENT intents. What Photo Picker adds is a much nicer, more intuitive UI and the ability to grant read-only access to user-selected media files. URIs obtained through Photo Picker can be persisted, but unlike with documents picker, they don't grant write access as well. If you're curious about how the photo picker works under the hood, I wrote an article that goes into that: https://blog.esper.io/android-photo-picker-backport/ https://blog.esper.io/android-photo-picker-backport/